Last week, Bloomberg News reported that porno distributor Private Media Group will post banner ads on the AltaVista search engine. Not exactly big news – sex and marketing have been in bed together for years. But the report does beg the question: Does sex really sell when linked to a product?

Research and experience says the answer depends on a number of issues. What kind of sexuality are you using to market your product? How will your audience react to that sexuality? Is your sex-pumped ad campaign relevant to your product? These and other factors weigh heavily on your marketing campaigns odds for success.

Take a close look, and you'll see that not all sex is the same. Victoria's Secret, for instance, uses nudity in its lingerie catalogs to create what amounts to an adult magazine. In this way, the company caters to women by featuring its products and to men by featuring its models. Calvin Klein, on the other hand, has a reputation for creating sexually suggestive advertisements. These often feature two models, a male and a female or two females, poised to begin a sexual act – but restrained enough to leave the juicy parts to the imagination.

Research shows that these two types of sexuality – nudity and suggestiveness – play wildly different to men and women. Females typically react positively to suggestiveness and negatively to nudity, while men prefer things the other way around. But this effect is not guaranteed. Calvin Klein, for example, caught flak a few years back for featuring teenagers in its sexually suggestive ads. The company failed to realize that however powerful sex might be, it can also elicit embarrassment, disgust, uneasiness and envy in both men and women.

What determines a positive or negative reaction to a sexual ad? It's fit with the product, for one thing. An example best illustrates this point. Years ago, television executive Darren Star created “Beverly Hills 90210,” a soap opera about wealthy students, and advertised it with great success using sexually suggestive billboards, TV spots and magazine ads. Star's newest show, “The $treet,” is about the sexual politics of Wall Street. His advertising campaign included billboards featuring a nearly naked women shrouded in an Oxford shirt. Audiences claimed the ads objectified women in the workplace, and forced the studio to remove the billboards. The two shows prove that sexuality's fit with a product can be a very subtle thing indeed.

What does all this mean for Private Media Group and AltaVista? The two parties should consider sexual marketing's ramifications. For sure, the ads will attract some people to PMG. But it may turn many others off to AltaVista. In the end, it's important to realize that sexuality's power to attract is matched only by its power to repel.